A Vintage Pink Stove For The Beach House

Oh snap, our “new” stove for the beach house is older than we are. In fact, it’s from 1959! And it’s pink! And I’m ridiculously excited about it. John’s current stove mood might best be described as “cautiously optimistic” – but we’ll get to that in a second.

The cost? $195 at a secondhand shop. It’s a place called Class & Trash that’s around 30 mins from our house. When they posted the pink stove to their Facebook page (they share new items that come in each week) not only did some people tag me, but I noticed it in my own feed and my eyeballs did a happy dance. It was like the universe put blinking lights around this stove for me. And underlined it. And bolded it. And tagged me on Facebook.

I left a message on the shop’s voicemail the very night they posted it (they had already closed when it went up) and DM-ed the owner in my best attempt to “call it,” but it wouldn’t have been mine had I not driven to the store the next morning and been standing there, money in hand, the minute they opened. She actually said to me “oh thank goodness you are buying this, now I can tell everyone who is asking about it that it’s sold.” Apparently it was quite the hot item! Then I noticed this one was listed on eBay for $750. Score. With a name like “Custom Imperial Stove by Frigidaire” it’s starting to feel pretty swanky indeed (just don’t look too closely at those crusty handles I have to scrub).

We spent around $75 renting a U-Haul to get it home the next day (it’s SO HEAVY that nobody could lift it up into a truck bed or SUV/van, so we needed to rent a truck with a ramp to get the little lady home… and even then we needed four guys to veeeeerrrry slowwwwly and carefully get it off of the truck and into our garage). You can’t see John in this photo because he’s behind it gripping it with his full bodyweight to make sure it didn’t come flying down the ramp like a wrecking ball.

It’s 40″ wide with two ovens and a warming drawer (and a built-in clock, and a bunch of other dials I can’t wait to play with) but ever the practical person, John “Practicality” Petersik said practical things like “we can’t burn down the 100 year old house that we are working so hard to rebuild with an old stove.” So although it was sold to us as “working” we’re getting it all rewired and triple safety checked so it’s essentially an old shiny pink metal shell, but the wiring and connections in the back will be brand new and safe. Take a gander at the old mess of wires back there. It’s a doozie, eh? Note: there’s a back panel that fits over these so they’re not usually in view, but it can be popped off to view/repair them.

We’ll also get to enjoy modern features, like a grounding line and an outlet to plug it in instead of these hot spliced wires that it came with (true story).

Everything needs a good scrubbing, but overall she’s in awesome shape. In fact, the appliance repairman that we had come look at it says it’s the best shape he’s ever seen for something so old. His guess: “the person who owned this had a lot of money, bought it for looks, and hardly ever cooked on it – maybe she ate out a lot.” So funny, right? He also guessed that she “drove a matching pink Cadillac.” I like this fictional lady. Like a Real Housewife of yesteryear.

We’ll probably spend around $200 restoring it with new wiring, which means the grand total for buying, transporting, and fixing up this baby will most likely come in at around $500 total (we’ll have a moving truck to get everything to the beach from our house, so the stove won’t need its own special truck again). And even if we go over and it clocks in at $600, we think is a pretty sweet deal since most other colorful vintage-style appliances are super expensive (this pink Big Chill oven is nearly $4,500 and this pink Smeg fridge is $3,000!)

All of the kitchen cabinetry and most of the other kitchen items (sconces, lighting, etc) have arrived – so we just have to wait for plumbing, electrical, and HVAC to be finalized (we’re almost there!) so the walls can go back up. We expect to spend a lot of summer weekends working on tile and kitchen assembly out there, so we can’t wait to share the pics when we get to that point! But at least the outside of the house is looking nearly done – which is SO EXCITING. Is this house not destined for a pink stove, or what?!

And this stove was actually super helpful in getting me off my vintage-fridge kick. I went through a period where was IN LOVE with every cool old colorful fridge we saw online, but Sir John of House Practical, First of His Name reminded me that a beach house needs to be full of popsicles and ice cream and those retro fridges have tiny freezers (about the size of two pints of ice cream) so he vetoed the idea. Thank goodness a cute and not-tiny stove found its way into our life! #pinkkismet

Psst- The most common question we get is still “what paint color is that?!” or “where did you get that bed/chair/art print/bench/etc” so we created one big page full of photos of our house along with every paint color and a bunch of furniture/accessory sources for each room. Here’s our whole-house master list for ya!